1. Technical Field
The present teaching relates to methods, systems, and programming for Internet services. Particularly, the present teaching relates to methods, systems, and programming for customizing a web site.
2. Discussion of Technical Background
Search is a commonly used feature on every web site, and users expect high quality results and experience from it. However, search is a very hard technological and scientific problem for most online publishers, who do not have existing core competency in search or the resources to build one. Making it even more challenging is that the search needs vary by publisher verticals and even from one publisher to another within the same vertical. For example, the web site search needs for a news publisher are different from that of an online forum site or an online shopping merchant. Plus each web site would like to have a search experience that is consistent with the look and feel of their web site.
Domain-specific search (also known as vertical search) solutions focus on one specific area of knowledge and create customized search experiences. Because of the domain's limited corpus and clear relationships between concepts, domain-specific search solutions provide extremely relevant results for searchers. The content domain or the vertical content area may be based on topicality, media type, or genre of content. Common verticals include shopping, automotive industry, legal information, medical information, and travel. In contrast to general web search engines, which attempt to index large portions of the World Wide Web using a web crawler, vertical search engines typically use a focused crawler that attempts to index only web pages that are relevant to a predefined topic or set of topics.
Some known solution offers users a partially customizable version of its web search service. The solution is based on general web search index and web search ranking. So, customers get a slice of web search rather than the domain-specific (vertical) search. In addition, the known solution does not have the ability for partners to influence ranking through promotions. Another known solution is mainly positioned as a search service for corporate sites. This solution uses partner content instead of general web search index, but the ranking is not based on the vertical. None of these known solutions offer the ability for the partner to customize the web site to include promotions and paid inclusions as part of the results.
Therefore, there is a need to provide a solution for customizing a web site with an improved domain-specific search capability.